TAIT'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
Nothing if not political appears to be the order of the new magazine and other literary enterprises of the present day. Is this good policy in itself? it may be so from the vivifying aid it lends to the springs of imaginative writing. We have therefore no right to complain of the leaven of Mr. Tait's Magazine: it is anything but dull: e.g. the life and jauntiness of the following paper is very pleasant, shrewd, and clever:
The Martinet.
The "Martinet" is the name of a genus, not of a species; the title of a race variously feathered, but having specific qualities in common. There is your military martinet, your clerical martinet, your legal martinet, and the martinet of common life, ("Gallicrista fastidiosa communis," Linnaeus would class him,) who is to the others what the house-sparrow is to the rest of his tribe. It is with him alone we have to do. The "martinet" is a person who is all his life violently busied in endeavouring to be a perfect gentleman, and who almost succeeds. He misses the point by over-stepping it. He is like one of those greyhounds which outrun the hare fleetly enough, but cannot "take" her when they have done so. They have a little too much speed, and a little too little tact. The martinet is always bent upon thinking, saying, doing, and having, every thing after a nicer fashion than other people, until his nicety runs into downright mannerism; all his ideas become "clipped taffeta," and all his eggs are known to have "two yolks." He rarely comes of age or is thoroughly ripe till near forty, before which he may be a little of the precise fop, and after which he changes to the somewhat foppish precisian, which is the best definition of him. He would be an excellent member of society were he not a little too nice for its every-day work, which, to speak a truth in metaphor, will not always admit of white gloves. He is remarkably consistent in all his proceedings, however, and the outward man is a perfect and complete type of the inward, and vice versa. His soul is never out of pumps and silk stockings, and picks its way amidst the little mental puddles and cross-roads of this world with a chariness of step, which is at once edifying and amusing. Of inward show he is not less "elaborate" than of outward; and, though a descendant of Eve, takes equal care of the clothing of both mind and body.
Were his tailor to be abandoned enough to attempt to palm upon him a coat of the very best Yorkshire, instead of the very best Wiltshire broad-cloth, (an enormity of which—horresco referens—he was once very near being the victim,) the one would be sure to lose, if discovered, the best of his customers, and the other the best of a month's sleep. If he wears a wig, his expenditure with his peruquier is never less than five-and-twenty guineas a-year. His cigars, though he smokes little, cost him nearly as much. His hat is water-proof; his stop-watch and repeater are of a scapement that never varies more than six seconds in the twelve months from the time-piece at the Observatory at Greenwich, where he has a friend, who is so good as sometimes to compare notes with him. By the advice of his boot-maker—who, by the way, has some knowledge of the length of his foot—he never puts on a new pair until they are at least a year old; and he parted with his last footboy because he one day discovered a perceptible difference between the polish of the right and left foot. In winter, he wears and recommends cork soles. His toilet is no sinecure; and on the table are always to be found, besides his dressing-box, which contains an assortment of combs, scissors, tweezers, pomades, and essences, not easily equalled, a bottle of "Eau de Cologne, veritable," a Packwood and Criterion strop; a case of gold-mounted razors, (the best in England,) which he bought, nearly thirty years ago, of the successor of "Warren," in the Strand, and a silvered shaving-pot, upon a principle of his own, redolent of Rigges' "patent violet-scented soap." His net-silk purse is ringed with gold at one end, and with silver at the other; and although not much of a snuff-taker, he always carries a box, on the lid of which smiles the portrait of the once celebrated and beautiful, though now somewhat forgotten, Duchess of D——, or the equally resplendent Lady Emily M——.
His table is of the same finish with his wardrobe. If he sat down to dinner, even when alone, in boots, that visitation which Quin ascribed to the prevalent neglect of "pudding on a Sunday"—an earthquake might be expected to follow. His spoons and silver forks are marked with his crest; and he omits no opportunity to inform his friends, that the right of the family to the arms was proved at Herald's College by his great uncle John. He has receipts for mulligatawny and oyster soups, not to be equalled; and another for currie-powder, which a friend of his obtained, as the greatest of favours, from Sir Stamford Raffles, and which, though bound in honour not to make known, he means to leave to his son by will, under certain injunctions. His cookery of a "French rabbit," provided the claret be first-rate, is superb; and on very particular occasions, he condescends to know how to concoct a bowl of punch, especially champagne punch, for the which he has a formula in rhyme, the poetry of which never, as is its happy case, losing sight of correctness and common-sense, comes, as well as its subject matter, home to "his business and his bosom." His "caviar" is, through the kindness of a commercial friend, imported from the hand of the very Russian cuisinier, who prepares it (unctuous relish!) for the table of the Emperor himself. His cheese is Stilton or Parmesan.
Like "Mrs. Diana Scapes," he is also "curious in his liquors," and, in despite of Beau Brummell, patronizes "malt," as far as to take one glass of excellent "college ale,"—which he gets through his friend Dr. Dusty of All Souls—between pastry and Parmesan. After cheese, he can relish one, and only one, glass of port—all the better if of the "Comet vintage," or of some vintage ten years anterior to that. His drink, however, is claret, old hock, Madeira, and latterly, since it has become a sort of fashion, old sherry. In these he is a connoisseur not to be sneezed at; and if asked his opinion, makes it a rule never to give it upon the first glass, invariably observing, that "if he would he couldn't, and if he could he wouldn't!" He produces anchovy toast as an indispensable in a long evening, after dinner, and to it he recommends a liqueur-glass of cherry-brandy, which he believes is of that incomparable recipe, of which the late King was so fond. If he be a bachelor, he has, in his dining-room, a cellaret, in which repose this, and other similar liquid rarities, and beneath his sideboard stands a machine, for which he paid twelve guineas, for producing ice extempore.
His literary tastes bear a certain resemblance to, and have a certain analogy with, his gustatory—proving the truth of that intimate connexion between the stomach and the head, upon which physiologists are so delighted to dwell. In poetry the heresies and escapades of Lord Byron are too much for him, although as a Peer and a gentleman he always speaks well and deferentially of him. Shelley he can make nothing of, and therefore says, which is the strict truth in one sense at least, that he has never read him. He praises Campbell, Crabbe, and Rogers, and shakes his head at Tom Moore; but Pope is his especial favourite; and if anything in verse has his heart, it is the "Rape of the Lock." Peter Pindar he partly dislikes, but Anstey, the "Bath Guide," is high in his estimation; and with him "Gray's Odes" stand far above those of Collins'. Of the "Elegy in a Country Church" he thinks, as he says, "like the rest of the world." "Shenstone's Pastorals" he has read. Burns he praises, but in his heart thinks him a "wonderful clown," and shrugs his shoulders at his extreme popularity. He says as little about Shakespeare as he can, and has by heart some half dozen lines of Milton, which is all he really knows of him. In the drama he inclines to the "unities;" and of the English Theatre "Sheridan's School for Scandal," and Otway's "Venice Preserved," or Rowe's "Fair Penitent," are what he best likes in his heart. John Kemble is his favourite actor—Kean he thinks somewhat vulgar. In prose he thinks Dr. Johnson the greatest man that ever existed, and next to him he places Addison and Burke. His historian is Hume; and for morals and metaphysics he goes to Paley and Dr. Reid, or Dugald Stewart, and is well content. For the satires of Swift he has no relish. They discompose his ideas; and he of all things detests to have his head set a spinning like a tetotum, either by a book or by anything else. Bishop Berkeley once did this for him to such a tune, that he showed a visible uneasiness at the mention of the book ever after. In Tristram Shandy, however, he has a sort of suppressed delight, which he hardly likes to acknowledge, the magnet of attraction being, though he knows it not, in the characters of Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and the Widow Wadman. His religious reading is confined to "Blair's Sermons," and the "Whole Duty of Man," in which he always keeps a little slip of double gilt-edged paper as a marker, without reflecting that it is a sort of proof that he has never got through either. His Pocket Bible always lies upon his toilet table. He knows a little of Mathematics in general, a little of Algebra, and a little of Fluxions, which is principally to be discovered from his having Emmerson, Simpson, and Bonnycastle's works in his library. In classical learning he confesses to having "forgotten" a good deal of Greek; but sports a Latin phrase upon occasion, and is something of a critic in languages. He prefers Virgil to Homer, and Horace to Pindar, and can, upon occasion, enter into a dissertation on the precise meaning of a "Simplex munditiis." He also delights in a pun, and most especially in a Latin one; and when applied to for payment of paving-rate, never fails to reply "Paveant illi, non paveam ego!" which, though peradventure repeated for the twentieth time, still serves to sweeten the adieu between his purse and its contents. He is also an amateur in etymologies and derivatives, and is sorry that the learned Selden's solution of the origin of the term "gentleman" seems to include in it something not altogether complimentary to religion. This is his only objection to it. He speaks French; and his accent is, he flatters himself, an approximation to the veritable Parisian. Modern novels he does not read, but has read "Waverley" and "Pelham."
His library is not large, but select; and as he does not sit in it excepting very occasionally, the fire grate is a movable one, and can be turned at will from parlour to library and vice versa,—a whim of his old acquaintance Dr. Trifle of Oxford. In it are his library table and stuffed chair; a bust of Pitt and another of Cicero; a patent inkstand and silver pen; an atlas, and maps upon rollers; a crimson screen, an improved "Secretaire;" a barometer and a thermometer. Upon the shelves may be found almost for certain Boswell's Johnson; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Peptic Precepts and Cook's Oracle; the Miseries of Human Life; Prideaux' Connexion of the Old and New Testament; Dr. Pearson's Culina Famulatrix Medecinae; Soame Jenyn's Essays; the Farrier's Guide; Selden's Table-talk; Archbishop Tillotson's Sermons; Henderson on Wines; Boscawen's Horace; Croker's Battles of Talavera and Busaco; Dictionary of Quotations; Lord Londonderry's Peninsular Campaigns; the Art of Shaving, with directions for the management of the Razor; Todd's Johnson's Dictionary; Peacham's Complete Gentleman; Harris' Hermes; Roget on the Teeth; Memoirs of Pitt; Jokeby, a Burlesque on Rokeby; English Proverbs; Paley's Moral Philosophy; Chesterfield's Letters; Buchan's Domestic Medicine; Debrett's Peerage; Colonel Thornton's Sporting Tour; Court Kalendar; the Oracle, or Three Hundred Questions explained and answered; Gordon's Tacitus an Elzevir Virgil; Epistolae obscurorum virorum; Martial's Epigrams; Tully's Offices; and Henry's Family Bible.
His general character for nicety is excellent, both in a moral and religious point of view: and he holds himself to have done a questionable thing in looking into a number of Harriette Wilson, in which a gay quondam friend of his figured. When he marries, the ceremony is performed by the Honourable and very Reverend the Dean of some place, to whom he claims a distant relationship. He takes his wine in moderation; never bets, nor plays above guinea points, and always at whist. He goes to church regularly; his pew is a square one, with green curtains. He dines upon fish on Good Friday, and declines visiting during Passion week in mixed parties. If he ever had any peccadilloes of any kind, they are buried in a cloud as snug as that which shrouded the pious Eneas when he paid his first visit to Queen Dido.
He dies, aged fifty-seven, of a pleuritic attack, complicated with angina pectoris; and having left fifty pounds to each of the principal charitable institutions of his neighbourhood, and fifty pounds to the churchwardens of his parish, to be distributed amongst the poor professing the religion of the Church of England, he is buried in his "family vault," and his last wish fulfilled,—that is to say, his epitaph is composed in Latin, and the inscription put up under the especial care and inspection of his friend Dr. Dusty of Oxford. Requiescat.